Strategic Reading, Ontologies, and the Future of Scientific Publishing

Abstract:  The revolution in scientific publishing that has been promised since the 1980s is about to take place. Scientists have always read strategically, working with many articles simultaneously to search, filter, scan, link, annotate, and analyze fragments of content. An observed recent increase in strategic reading in the online environment will soon be further intensified by two current trends: (i) the widespread use of digital indexing, retrieval, and navigation resources and (ii) the emergence within many scientific disciplines of interoperable ontologies. Accelerated and enhanced by reading tools that take advantage of ontologies, reading practices will become even more rapid and indirect, transforming the ways in which scientists engage the literature and shaping the evolution of scientific publishing.

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Although many biological ontologies were originally developed independently, the need for interoperability has driven collaboration, a good example being the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO), which currently has 54 participating projects (18), including Microarray Gene Expression Data (MGED), BioPAX, for biological pathways data, and Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA)....

The infrastructures and services to support strategic reading practices will no doubt be promoted by open access and alternative publishing models, which are already being widely discussed in the academic community. However, research on information behavior and the use of ontologies is also needed...."